The online systems on the Internet and the intra-office systems are formed of many applications operating on the computers. These applications are sometimes executed in direct on the computers and are also executed on the interpreter programs operating on the computers. The applications include various jobs such as the online job and batch job and these jobs are respectively realized with programs which have been designed and installed in accordance with the inherent format of applications and then operated.
Although the applications are installed and operated in various profiles as described above, operation environments of applications may be divided into the application and the system resource for operation thereof. Particularly, the latter is called a hosting environment. Many company offices issue the order to form the hosting environment and maintenance jog thereof as the out-sourcing to external offices in view of saving the maintenance and management cost of the system foundation of the computers for operating the applications and the network for connecting the computers. The out-sourcing order is destined to a service provider which is called the data center. The data center can provide the hosting environments such as computers and network connections for operating the applications. For example, the out-sourcing of the system foundation of the company home page corresponds to utilization of such hosting environments.
Moreover, the application itself operating on the foundation such as computers is also often ordered for the out-sourcing to the service office called the application service provider (ASP) for the purpose of reduction in the maintenance cost. For example, the out-sourcing of management and maintenance job of the mail server is the suitable example.
The applications are often realized generally on a plurality of computers distributed in the network established even in the online system or the intra-office system and are configured in the complicated formats. In order to stably operate the system to realize a business application consisting of a plurality of format elements, it is required to detect defective part in the format elements of system, namely to always monitor and analyze the application to find out existence of bottleneck or fault. As described above, the application format is considerably complicated and therefore it is difficult to manually monitor the entire part of application and take an appropriate measure for the problem. Accordingly, various attempts have been conducted to realize automated processes.
Remote monitoring of system resources such as networks and server computers is generally conducted and therefore it is possible to detect generation of failure and trouble by remotely monitoring various system resources through the standardized protocol such as SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) disclosed in the non-patent document 1. In addition, the specifications for management of system resources based on Web sites are also established like the WBEM (Web Based Enterprise Management) disclosed in the non-patent document 2. For these documents, easier operation management is the key point.
For the existing system, a system manager has manually conducted the jobs such as alteration in the system configuration and replacement of apparatuses in which a fault is generated based on the monitoring information obtained with the SNMP or the like. In view of supporting the jobs to be executed manually, it is analyzed, based on the measured performance information, where a problem or performance bottleneck exists in the system elements. The result obtained is used for alteration of the system configuration. Accordingly, following effects can be attained. Namely, a load of the system manager may be alleviated and system operation and management cost may also be lowered. For analysis of such bottleneck, a system has been known, in which the information on the performance including the bottleneck is measured by sharing a load to the computers for measuring performance through virtual realization of a plurality of clients connected to the Web system 30 to be subjected to the performance evaluation and the information on the performance of the working Web system and the information on the bottleneck are evaluated. (Patent document 1)
A contract regarding service quality which is agreed between a company which conducts out-sourcing and a company which provides services of the data center is considered as an index of the automated processes covering all processes up to alteration of system configuration from measurement of performance information. This contract is generally called a service level agreement (SLA) and is required, in the data center, to maintain the service level conforming to the service level agreement.
As the prior arts for automatically maintaining such service level, various examples are known. In one example of method (Patent Document 2), amount of calculation resources is automatically increased or decreased in comparison with the service level agreement for each user identifier based on the result of monitoring of the operating conditions of the computer. In another example of method (Patent Document 3), resources of the common server are allocated for the clients in accordance with the pattern of use of clients. In the other example of method (Patent Document 4), the maximum resources to be allocated to the application is determined in accordance with the service level, the resource allocation coefficient is also determined in accordance with user service level, and thereby amount of resources of each resource to be allocated to the application is determined with product of these maximum resources and resource allocation coefficient.
For the automatic operation and management of system based on the actual service level agreement including these examples of method, a method is known, in which a practical index which is called the service level objective (SLO) is set and a feedback system which attains such index is established. Moreover, the service level agreement is often agreed by designating the practical service level objective.    [Patent Document 1] JP-A No. 131907/2003    [Patent Document 2] U.S. 2002/0059427A1    [Patent Document 3] U.S. 2002/0143945A1    [Patent Document 4] JP-A No. 195268/2001    [Non-Patent Document 1] SNMP Specifications (RFC1157), Issued by IETF, “Searched on Nov. 18, 2003”    Internet: ietf.org/rfc/rfc1157.txt    [Non-Patent Document 2] WBEM Specifications, Issued by DMTF, “Searched on Nov. 18, 2003”    Internet: dmtf.org/standards/wbem
However, in order to realize automated allocation process of the resources by limiting kinds of the applications in the prior art, the resource allocation changing rule based on the item of performance information to be measured and the result of measurement must be previously embedded in the measurement program or in the resource allocation changing program.
In other words, since the measurement of performance information and the analysis for bottleneck based on the result of measurement are carried out depending on the inherent structure of the application, allocation of resources corresponding to the application of a novel kind can be realized by solving the problems that the performance information measurement items and the resource allocation changing rule must be newly installed for the performance information measuring program and resource allocation changing program and the measurement items and changing rule described above must be generated for each execution of a new application.
Moreover, the actual service level objective is often expressed as a physical index which is considered as the index having a comparatively higher degree of abstraction such as a response time in the online application. Accordingly, the application which is generally formed of a plurality of elements will also result in the problem that the service level objective cannot be maintained if the application is not expressed with a more practical performance index such as the response time of each structural element.